Lubricant system is an important component for maintaining normal operation of the engine. Lubricant keeps circulating within the engine so as to provide lubrication and heat dissipation for moving parts of the engine. When an abnormality occurs to some important components of the engine, such as the bearing, the lubricant heat exchanger, sealing of oil and gas and so forth, consumption of lubricant will change abnormally. Therefore, change in the consumption of lubricant is one of the important indicators reflecting performance of the engine.
Deterioration of performance of the engine can be spotted in a timely manner through continuously monitoring short-term and long-term changes in lubricant consumption and parameters of the lubricant system, and flameout of the engine in flight caused by direct or indirect failure of the lubricant system can be avoided. Therefore, all airline companies attach great importance to the monitoring of lubricant quantity within the lubricant system of the engine. To know operation condition of the engine through calculating consumption rate of lubricant may guarantee flight safety of an aircraft.
Currently, the specific way adopted by airline companies to calculate consumption rate of lubricant is as follows: after an aircraft landed, the ground crew manually fill up the tank with the lubricant, and then manually record quantity of added lubricant. Information of quantity of the added lubricant is then input into the data input system of the airline company, and then uploaded to the data server of the airline company. Since each time the lubricant in the tank is filled up, the ratio between the quantity of the added lubricant for each time and the operation time between two consecutive additions of lubricant may reflect the lubricant consumption rate within this time period.
The existing ways involve the participation of lots of manpower. Human factors and deviations in workflow will unavoidably cause error of data, which also directly affects accuracy of the obtained lubricant consumption data. In addition, time-effectiveness in obtaining data of lubricant addition quantity cannot be guaranteed if it is input manually, and it also causes failure to obtain information of lubricant consumption in a timely manner. For example, due to requirements on arrangement of airlines operation, some aircrafts often stay overnight at other stations for days, and objective situations at other stations often affects the acquisition of lubricant consumption data.
Although each airline company has being devoted to developing a system capable of automatically monitoring lubricant of an engine all the way, no airline company has ever brought out such system. They often lack a means for timely predicting early warnings on the abnormality of parameters of the lubricant system of the engine. Once malfunction occurs to the lubricant system of the engine, major accidents such as the engine being shut down will often occur.